The photos and recordings capture moments of the religious life of Turks and Muslim Tartars, the Friday prayer (juma), the celebration of Kurban Bayram (Feast of Sacrifice), one of the most important holidays of the Islamic religion, along with Ramazan Bayram (Feast of Ramadan), prayers, local pilgrimages, moments during the marriage and the circumcision ceremony.
Among the secular customs and holidays, the images capture Hıdırlez or Kıdırlez, a holiday related to spring, which celebrates the regeneration of nature. And the oldest recording, a silent film from 1979, kept in the archives of the Romanian Television, that presents a community meeting in Techirghiol (Constanța County) on the occasion of a küreş competition (Tatar fights).
Some of the materials were collected during field researches conducted after 1990, in the communities of Turks and Tatars in Tulcea County, by researchers of the Museum of Ethnography and Folk Art in Tulcea, while others are part of the Romanian Television’s archive.
The visual documents are accompanied by the explanations of Dr. Iuliana Titov the researcher responsible for the field research. The researcher’s perspective is complemented by an insight offered through two essays, one about the traditions and customs of the Tartars from Dobrogea, of the Tatar writer and ethnographer Nevzat Yusuf Sarıgöl and of the Tatar writer, Nermin Yusuf; and a second essay on the traditions and customs of the Dobrogean Turks, written by the Turkish historian Mustafa Ali Mehmet .